The Role of a Lifetime

Lithuania

2003

16 Min

Color, Black and White

English

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This film combines three distinct elements: the first is an interview with the British film-maker Peter Watkins, recorded in Lithuania where Watkins lived for many years in the course of his self imposed exile from Britain. The second is a sequence of drawings of the Lithuanian landscape, some depicting an unusual theme park, Gruto Park, repository of Social Realist sculptures from the post-war era. The third comprises footage of Brighton life, shot by an amateur film enthusiast and deposited in the archives in Brighton. Narkevicius’ construction of the film unites these disparate components, relating sound and image to produce a strangely compelling play between Watkins’ commentary and the imagery on the screen. Peter Watkins and Deimantas Narkevicius share a profound skepticism in relation to images that promise to be authentic representations of history. Independently of each other they have produced films with similar concerns: dismantling the conventional visual rhetoric of historic testimony and searching for a cinematic language that does not subject the history to the forces of ideological assimilation or mass media commodification. —ubuweb

Director

Deimantas Narkevičius

Deimantas Narkevičius is an artist and filmmaker born in 1964 in Utena, currently based in Vilnius. He graduated sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts and spent a year in London in 1992/93, which affected his later interest in site-specific art and concern with the concept of place in a broader discursive sense.

Since the late Nineties he mostly works in film and video, experimenting with the film structure and thematizing the weight of subjective memories and personal revisions of the History. As the artist has himself stated a number of times, his films in a certain way are extended sculptures, not only closely adjusted to the physical sites of their installation, but also thematically departing from very specific personal circumstances or experiences. Nevertheless, working in different film formats, often inserting fragments of other media – drawing, found photograph and footage into his films, Narkevičius expands temporal and spatial boundaries of his narratives. With… read more

Deimantas Narkevičius is an artist and filmmaker born in 1964 in Utena, currently based in Vilnius. He graduated sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts and spent a year in London in 1992/93, which affected his later interest in site-specific art and concern with the concept of place in a broader discursive sense.

Since the late Nineties he mostly works in film and video, experimenting with the film structure and thematizing the weight of subjective memories and personal revisions of the History. As the artist has himself stated a number of times, his films in a certain way are extended sculptures, not only closely adjusted to the physical sites of their installation, but also thematically departing from very specific personal circumstances or experiences. Nevertheless, working in different film formats, often inserting fragments of other media – drawing, found photograph and footage into his films, Narkevičius expands temporal and spatial boundaries of his narratives. With these insertions from another time, another place and another story, he thus thickens the web of suggested meanings, and the told stories acquire an almost inexhaustible wealth of links, connections and connotations.
The artist described his themes of interest in the following way:

“Although my works deal with contemporary themes, the underlying problems usually go back a long time. I started my work as an artist in a period of dynamic change for my society. The stress and neurosis caused by all the dynamism diverted this society from both historical reflection and future concerns. The ideological ‘orientation’ that dominated for decades was – among other things – an attempt at creating a society above and beyond history. The new political situation re-inserted us into the rotating circuit of history, which inevitably requires a vision. But as we started working on such a vision for ourselves, things re-emerged from the past; phenomena that had been hidden under the surfaces of ideology. They lead us into uncharted, unwanted, unpleasant territory, muddling our vision of the future”.

Deimantas Narkevičius has gained wide recognition within the international art scene and represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2003. He took part in Manifesta, Busan and Gwangju biennials of Contemporary Art, Münster Skulptur 2007, the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. —ndg.lt

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